In the Words of the Dead the Gods Are Not Kind
by FigureofDismay
Summary: She always thought she would be his tempering force but she isn't. If anything he is hers. Magic realism AU. Red/Liz pairing. Altered version of Blacklist reality, with a side of strange powers and underworld-allusions.
1. Chapter 1

**Magic realism and surrealism lie ahead. This story will be 2-3 parts in total. I have little to say in defense of such a departure, except that none of the timeline makes sense with real world logic, does it? And trickster psychopomp Red is my weakness, but self-actualizing ruling queen despoina persephone-parable Liz is my great love./Title from "the Mountain is Burning" by Johnny Flynn, which I strenuously recommend.**

* * *

She learned a lot from Red. A strange collection of skills not at all what she had expected when she first impulsively threw her lot in with his.

She learned to see the monsters they hunted, not as a collection of pathologies and clinical likelihoods, but as rank beasts driven by instinct and greed. She became able to predict that instinct with some long-slumbering but acute muscle in her gut, and to be able to lift her face and scent these beasts on the wind. She was his hunting dog, his captain of the guard. Sometimes she pointed him on his way and sometimes she leapt first, brought him back something still and bloodied.

She always thought she would be his tempering force but she isn't. If anything he is hers.

She became known, a beautiful, pale, slim woman with soft hair so dark and glossy, always in her trim black tailored coat with a red scarf around her pale, feminine neck. The red, red scarf, the color of fresh dark blood, crisp with silk and soft with cashmere, was his present to her their very first winter, when they haunted Prague through Christmas and Kiev through New Years, shivering and surrounded with opulence. She wore the scarf and painted her lips the same colour, and her hair had grown long again by that time and her eyes had gone hard and sharp and lovely as sapphires - and that was how she appeared in the pictures taken by Interpol that then appeared in many newspapers around the world. Red's consort, they called her, at long last, and she rejoiced. She'd planned and staged the sighting, after all. Finally, they stopped calling her hostage and admitted what she was.

From him she has learned to hordes small pleasures, to experience them completely and store them up for the lean days when the hunt was hard and their fleeing even harder. They spent a scant week in a borrowed villa on a Caribbean island in the cloying humid heat and brilliant sun, sailing on a boat he hired or dozing on their shaded veranda overlooking the sea, passing the threshold back and forth between basking in the warmth and growing limp and irritated under it - and he helped her learn this too, to embrace the heat, the dozing, the hard work in the brisk sea wind, not to feel embarrassed or squeamish about the feeling of her own clean sweat gathering on her skin.

That bright week of sweet fruit and warmth and azure seas, he helped her pack away within herself and bring forth small parcels of, later, to keep them warm and contented as they had to flee from a particular, vicious enemy that was snarling and snapping too closely at their heels.

They were forced to travel great distances and cram themselves into cold, cheerless little boltholes for a good month of sleeplessness and discomfort until they managed a plan to turn their pursuit around on their pursuer. And when they sprung their plan, and found themselves victorious but bleeding, deep in woods spangled with ice, their breath misting as she held him in place and pushed her hand against the wound in his side, feeling against her palm his slick, warm blood, his breathing flank, his fine, crisp shirt going all stiff and crumpled, and found she could not look away from their dead enemies on the ground not far from them, he demanded she recite those days in the tropics. He helped her unwrap the little gems of them as he lay still and kept breathing and bleeding, helped her forget her shivering fear and her throbbing knee and remember the feeling of sun on her skin like sweet fever, the pleasant burn of use in her hands, her shoulders after a day on their little boat, the taste of the cold, creamy, sweet-tart melon soup with tender little shrimps they'd had one night, how she'd been too hot to eat all day but it had tasted so good and refreshing.

By the time help had come she could feel the ghost of that clean sweat on her skin, she didn't shiver, and Red lay smiling up at her from where he lay on the frosted, rotted leaves, and she understood the promise that strung between them. When they were cold and in fear and in pain, those better days were not banished, she could always unwrap them again and again, slip them onto her tongue and taste them as sweet repast.

And also, she understood that she was never to know which were the better days, she would need the savour of endless heat for when she looked out at a field of ice, she would need the smoke and sugar-sting of winter frost and honest fear for when she stifled in hot climes, or worse, in terrible boredoms and endless tepid travel, which would always threaten her with doubt, with blinding aimlessness.

* * *

She was miserable at first, the constant motion made her feel like she was being pulled and pulled and stretched and taut so that she would certainly soon snap and fizzle away to nothing. She thought she would love it, traveling with him, like a great adventure. When she didn't, she thought she would grow used to it in time, the lost sensation, feeling like she was loosing, loosing, leaving things behind, always wrong footed, always tired, always staggering and disheveled and feeling unprepared, but no matter how hard she tried she could never quite catch up to her Red.

He fretted over her and petted her and slowed their progress more and more, though the Bureau and Interpol had been particularly avid in their hunt at the time, thinking he'd dragged her along unwilling. He bought her trinkets and fine things such as she'd never dreamed of having as a girl, he kissed her and kissed her, and that alone had raised her spirits for a time, she reached for him whenever they could manage, perhaps more than was decent.

Their bodies together was pleasure and comfort and hope and food and drink and love and respite all at once to her, so she became shameless. _Slow, slow, easy, _he would often murmur in her ear, _are you sure? look what a state you're in. _And she would tell him _I'm sad and scared and tired and I want to feel good. You make me feel good, your voice, your smell, the feel of you inside me, around me. Please, please, make me feel good. _

And he would yield to her, sometimes he would be tender and sometimes rushed and sometimes he would punish her with pleasure and wanting and and firmness and pleasure again until she was a quiet, warm nothing with all her desolation emptied out and chased away, just a breathing shape he would bathe with warm clothes and tuck into bed and she would finally sleep and sleep.

But these were palliatives and not a cure, still she was stretched and pulled, still more and more of the woman she'd thought she was was shaved off in small flakes and fine curls like hard wood under a plane, whittled away and away, until she was so afraid of what little she'd be left with. The more Red told her she was precious and wondrous, the more she feared that she was ugly and empty and weak. The more she waited to feel less like a thing battered around in the wind like a spit of dandelion down, the more she felt rootless and unmoored, homeless and weary.

She had tried to hide it from him, her emptiness, her sorrow, her fear felt like shame though she knew he would never her scold her or begrudge her for them. She wanted to be strong, his wild one, his Winter Queen, she wanted to know that she was the girl who proves herself in every fairy story.

But one night he came to their room after a meeting, and a nice dinner with Dembe that she'd declined, pleading the need to nurse an aching head. He found her curled atop the covers with tears on her cheeks like crystals of ice, though his early return startled away any more that wanted to fall.

_Oh, my dear one, _he said, sitting down at her side and smoothing her hair from her forehead like a doting papa, like a loving husband, and the ice-tears pricked and frosted over her eyes again. He smelled of good cooking and rich wine and sweet cologne and clean male skin as he leaned over her and she wanted to wrap herself in him, fill herself on his fury, his love. _You are miserable. _

_Yes, _she said, the word spilling from her mouth like a petulant sob, _I don't mean to be. I don't want to be. I can't help it._

_I'm so sorry, I should never have taken you away with me. If we are very careful, it may not be too late for you to turn back._

_Don't you dare send me away. Don't you dare, _she commanded, prone though she was, _Anyway, its far too late, you know it as well as I. I've as good as eaten the pomegranate seeds, going with you. Can't we just settle someplace? Can't we just live in a little house by the sea and be just two people, just live a little life?_

_We will have that, my love, _he said, took her slender, cold hand and kissed each of her blunt fingertips and they heated under his warm lips as though he breathed the life back in them - so strange to think he was life and death both, but neither at all, outside the whole game, so ancient and implacable, out pacing her in every direction. _But there is so much work still to do. _

_I know. I understand, _she said, and dashed the tears from her lashes, though she didn't really understand, not yet, still thought in terms of soon and later rather than always and never. _I'm just as afraid of stopping, you know, that it won't be any better. I don't know what I am now, I can't seem to catch up to myself and see. Sometimes I think I'm nothing at all, like maybe you didn't save me after all and somehow I just forgot to fade away._

_No, _he said, and there was that hugeness of him, the implacable immensity of his will drawing him up, forcing the air from the room like a wave of heat or cold, _That's not true. I saved you, you're as whole as me. Don't I lay with my ear to your breast every night to listen to your heart beat? Don't I live and die by your will? Don't we have our simple pleasures?_

_Yes. Yes of course. It only feels that way. Nothinging feels very real anymore, _she said, and began to laugh, what an absurdity, like calling the ocean a puddle, like calling a dire wolf a dog. Of course it's not real, of course it's so much more than that.

_I think what you need, _said the man called Raymond, the Thrice Wise within him subsiding once more, _Is a way to be useful, something for you to accomplish. I wanted to offer you every comfort, every ease, but I think idleness is not a kindness to you after all. You need something to do._

She felt her heart wake and spark to life at that, like something bounding in eagerness and straining at it's lead. Yes, yes, something to do, something to exercise her own Will, which was tireless and steely if not so eternally vast. Something to seek, to bend her body towards, something on which to spend her half-drowsing frustrations and hungers and sharpnesses. _Oh yes, _she begged, _Oh, Raymond, yes please. Something to do._

* * *

So they began with her lessons, more formal ones, stranger ones. She learned the Order and the Way, and the Disciples in long ranks and files, slowly diminishing each in size, and all hers to call upon if she spoke his true name in their ears - a name like a key, not really a sound at all but a Will, like a puff of thought, the sensation of a clap within the space between one's ears.

She had a Will too, to stretch and test to see if it would grow supple enough and strong enough to wield. Her only true inheritance, revealed to her at last. Raymond had told her he'd wished he could shield her from the dark reality of who they were, that she'd never need to know these things - but that he'd also hoped, deep down, that she was truly blessed with a Will that was as great as her legacy demanded and that he might see her come to command it, knowing she would be glory and wonder itself if she did.

* * *

_Didn't you always know, somewhere in that sharp, sharp instinct of yours? _He'd pleaded into her ear, as she denied and marveled and protested at the shape of what she was, _And didn't those around you, little keen-sniffing children of earth that they are, always sense it? Look at you just a little bit askance? It might have been easier if you had known, but then you'd be as twisted round and driven from goodness and sanity as all of us who are of Elsewhere. We thought maybe you could be happier here, live the little clean life, in a straight line under the sun, just like you mother wanted for you. She was human, too, and so angry with your father for keeping you both Underground. And anyway, if I'd kept you after and raised you like mine in that Sideways place, where would we be now, you and I?_

_Always like this, Raymond. I know we always would have been. Only strung up in a hundred, hundred more ways to belong to each other, _she'd said, and took up his hand in both of hers, keeping it on her lap, but her stomach shifted unpleasantly with shivers at the thought of being so subsumed by him, so without boundaries, so wrapped up in the power he could have held over her that way. And she was greedy, she wanted him as her lover only, not to be always battling in ways of unwinding other taints and obligations from between them. And to grow up in his world, that winding place she'd now glimpsed? No. She was sure she would have withered all up under the weight of it. _But I'm glad you arranged it the way you did, just the same. I'm glad of Sam, I'm glad of growing up in the straight line, in the sunlight. Of having time to be human, to become ready to know you. Of being old enough to know this is better._

_I grew up in the sunlight, too, you know, _he said, _We still are more alike than you know._

_I broke many rules to save you the way I did, _he said later, _I drew attention to myself in ways that are not safe. I'm going to have to leave here very soon, Lizzie, and for a very long time._

_You won't go without me, _she told him, _I won't let you. And you wouldn't, I know better than that. You'd take me away tonight if you could._

_Yes, damn it, if you were well enough I would, _he said, and pressed his face to her hair to hide his guilt.

_Good._

* * *

Red could talk anybody into anything because he kept a lick of magic tucked into his cheek beside his back-most tooth, like a sliver hard candy and just as burning-sweet. When he needed to play a trick or tell a lie or ask a favour he would touch the tip of his tongue to that tiny lick of magic and say what he meant to say and those around him would scurry to do his bidding. Only, when he met his Lizzie, becalmed as her Elsewhere heart was in her breast, as rigid and orderly and trained up as she was in the ways of the Sunlight world, he spoke with magic on his tongue and she did no more than frown with polite skepticism and fold her pretty pale hands in her lap. On her, the magic, which moved every man or woman in both their worlds, did not a thing.

Her imperviousness did not anger him. Oh, no, it was like dangling a shiny thing before a bored housecat, suddenly his ears were pricked, suddenly his eyes alight, suddenly she was all he could see. _What a marvel she is_, he thought, _My surrogate Brother's surrogate daughter. I wonder what she'd made of. I wonder if she will let me near enough to tell._

* * *

When she first met him, as she aproached him she paused, the way the ancient memory in us begs us to pause at the edge of the dark wood, the little whisper that says wait, there might be danger, there might be silent things with teeth. And then she remembered, she was one of the things with teeth and her spine straightened. She met his eyes.

He was kind to her. He was slippery and careful and fast talking and kept her spinning in circles with his trickster-raven dances, but he was kind. She didn't trust it. She wanted to find those teeth she'd sensed. She wanted to see what he would do all provoked and unfurled, she wanted to make him turn and snap - because that's what men do when you push them hard enough, they turn and snap. Even her Daddy had done, once or twice, and made them both cry. But even when she went to rail at him every night, Red didn't. He watched, he talked, he smiled his strange half-smile and in his disjointed way he was kind.

She didn't know what to make of it. It was new.

* * *

When she near to healed up enough to be released from her narrow white bed with the stiff white sheets and the little plastic device clamped to her finger measuring how well she breathed, her colleagues and superiors came to circle round her and make her tell her tale. She could tell in their faces, which had grown stiff like masks, that they didn't believe what she'd told them of the night that she faced her husband and Berlin and nearly died and still won.

She didn't blame them. She was lying after all. But she told it again, the best she was able, walking so close to the line of truth that the sides of her feet touched it, crossed over it and back, but using only words and concepts that they would understand. And then, to be sure, she let her mouth go soft and pouting like a tired girl's and let her eyes go heavy and pained like a widow's, and pled her confusion, her weakness and infirmity. They looked down at her in her hospital bed and looked suddenly awkward, squeamish. She told them she was alright to go on, just as soon as the nurse brought her medicine, and the nervous children of men packed up their files and fled as though from fire, or as shy, awkward boys from a woman about to undress.

After they'd gone she wanted Red, wanted to call for him and be gathered up in his arms again like she was a child, like she was his gentle, little wife, the way he had the night he found her and brought her back from death. She was shaking with nerves now that the interrogation was over, like a little woodland creature caught in a sprung trap. But she wasn't sure how to reach him, now.

She hadn't seen him or Dembe since the day before when he'd confessed his nature and hers. Maybe he was still raw with confessing. Maybe he didn't want her circling, snuffling colleagues to see her and him together, next to each other. They wouldn't touch, probably, if he'd been there standing by but even little confirming glances would be enough to condemn her, now that they were looking to condemn. Perhaps even just the crackle between them would have been enough.

Now though, even if his absence saved her from meeting the teeth of the trap rather than being merely cornered, she was left stranded. High and dry with only conventional means to make contact, and only conventional means to travel, unless her inheritance proved itself instantly, ability springing up savant-like.

She dressed in the clothes from the bag he'd brought her, not hers but clothes that were neat and new and warm - for it was bitter autumn and the wind was brisk off the Potomac. Her legs were weak and barely willing but they held, all her insides ached gently with the change in altitude from lying to walking and her skin still felt as tender as a sunburn but she made it out of the hospital without faltering or being stopped. When she walked into the day a man in a dark overcoat detached himself from the side of the building where he'd leaned, and she knew they hadn't trusted her after all, only pretended.

She had an address on a slip of paper, found folded in the pocket of the jacket she'd been given, written in Red's slanted, elongated hand. She took four different cabs and cut through alleyways but the man in the dark overcoat stuck to her, not too far, not too close, unshakable. She wanted to do what she'd seen Red do, open a door and step through into a different place than it usually led to, and close it up tight behind her, gone in a wink. She didn't know how.

The address was a little shop with a dirty window that said 'Antiques' that was piled high inside with all manner of things, terribly dim and terribly dusty. A sweet faced old man with white, white hair that billowed about his head in silky curls sat behind the counter, reading a book he hunched over with interest. A bell rang when she stepped in the door, not the traditional little chime, clang, slap of shop bells hitting the door, but some deeper, wider ring that she felt in her teeth and breastbone. The man with the white hair put down his book and looked at her with recognition, beaming, came up to greet her as an old friend with both hands outstretched.

A similarly white haired and beaming and tall and narrow woman came out of the gloom at the back of the shop and together they greeted her and spoke to her and ushered her through their dim, maze-like shop, past piled furniture and boxes of rolled up rugs and high glass-fronted cabinets and indigo and white ginger jars taller than a man. They talked and talked and talked to her and she would never afterward remember a single word they said, but as they hurried her along her heart felt lighter and lighter with joy, listening to them. They took both her hands, one each, with cool, smooth hands that were steady and sure, and led her - one ahead of her and one behind - through a narrow door down long, winding stairs.

The round stairwell was so dark she couldn't see a thing and she felt as though something in the back of her mind was being stretched and stretched like a rubber band about to snap and she had a moment of utter panic, thinking she'd made a horrible mistake, fallen into a nightmare somehow - though that had happened long ago - but the old man and the old woman's hands gripped hers hard and kept her from falling or stopping. Her shoulder brushed the outer wall, the material of her new coat hissing against it, and it felt like unfinished, unjoined wood, as though they walked down the center of an enormous hollow tree. Her heart beat wildly in her chest, and for just a second she wanted to old apartment and her dog and her pretend marriage, her phone and her alarm-clock and her job and all the life she'd expected for herself in her sneakers-and-backpack childhood. Gone, gone, gone, now floating up away, above her, left behind for good. Tears wicked down her cheeks, she couldn't help it, and the woman and the man spoke to her soothingly, cooed at her like the sympathetic granny and grandpa she'd never had and she remembered that on the other side of this giving up was Red and she had nothing left at all behind her, nothing, nothing.

Like her husband had been nothing, had deflated like a balloon when she reached into his chest, and his blood had run up her arms and then there had been Nothing - but she didn't like to think about that.

Then she and her two escorts burst out into the light, so bright and blue-grey white that more tears fell from her eyes, and finally the old man and the old woman let her hands go so she could wipe her lashes dry, the woman leaned over and pressed a firm, grandmotherly kiss on her cheek as she pulled away. The washed out light became a place, and when she looked around the old man and the old woman were gone.

They had been in the city but now they weren't, they were in a gentle, still wood, by a narrow, tame ribbon of river. It had been brisk autumn, blustery but still warm underneath, and now it was cold, and a sparse, fluttering snow fell. There were no buildings anywhere in sight, nor any sign of the staircase she'd come down.

On the river there was a little boat painted red and blue and gold, just a rowboat really with a carved, arching prow that seemed a little overwrought for its humble scale. Beside the river stood Red, with his small smile that meant his mouth was closed around a thousand secrets and his eyes looked into all her secrets and liked what they saw. It was the smile that said _I contain more than I am_, that she had seen on his face that first day and known exactly meant even though she hadn't understood why or how, and the first, tiniest bell in her had called her to begin waking - the last, biggest brother of which she had heard ring as she'd walked through a door.

_Only the first part of the journey must be made with such strange means, _he said, taking her hand and leading her to the little boat, _Very soon we can return to comfort and modernity. I wouldn't have spent a fortune on my plane if I were always restricted to the Old customs, after all. But first we much prove our willingness. First you must see my home country._

She stepped into the boat.


	2. Chapter 2

**the scale of this story has shifted a bit, but I have handle on the reality of this fic which is at least 3/4 of the battle. As for the actual content? Well, you tell me.**

* * *

They had begun over the wreckage of her marriage. Not when she came to him in tears, late, out of the frigid spring night - spring that year was also a sham, never warming til the great summer heat came - admitting he was right after all, wordlessly begging comfort in his arms. That night was almost chaste. If you can see chastity in sitting curled together for hours, long after her tears had dried, clinging but subdued with grief. She'd been dulled with sorrow and tiredness but she'd still felt something like heat or friction or a tugging cord of longing underneath her heart and between her legs, and known she was already on her way to him, already gone.

No, instead it was the little bunker, their War Room he'd called it, their files, their evidence board which was a minimal as modern art, so few were the solid facts on the ground. So much time was passed away there, in that grim basement down an alley, windowless and girded with locks, all of that time in anxiety or boredom, never comfort.

Still, afterwards she would hold always a little fondness for that grey room and their first true project together, not under the Bureau's purview but theirs. Their only great endeavor played in earthly bounds - largely, for a time.

Red had the recordings they'd recovered from the house across the street upon the demise of the man with the apple. She didn't want to watch them, and he didn't either, but they did, to see what her husband did when he was alone. She felt no connection to the woman or the man on the recordings. The angle was high, and there was no color, yes, but even so the woman in the recordings seemed a stranger, there was something wrong with this woman's posture, something limp and flinching and leaning, something nervy and aimless.

They both watched the recordings. All of them, with still faces and sick hearts, just to be sure they hadn't missed anything - just because neither was willing to admit that it was unbearable. He had suggested they skip past some parts of the recordings, the parts where she was there, the parts that should have been intimate and inviolable but she wanted to see it all. She wasn't willing to flinch and if she was going to put herself through this she was going to put him through it too, if he could stomach it, if he was willing to stand by her while she dissected the cold, decrepit carcass of her marriage.

_What do you want me to say,_ she said, as the woman on the recording was fucked by her husband - thankfully there was no sound - and Red paced behind her, rigid with anger, _That he was horrible? That he never made me come? Because I did, almost always. I was his job. He had to keep me satisfied. He's the only one who ever tried so hard, I suppose I should have known._

He made a pained noise of a sort she'd never heard him make before, as though she'd struck him. He was quiet for a long time, she could hear he had stopped pacing but she didn't dare look to see if he was still watching the recording, if she took her eyes away she would never look back at the screen. And she needed to see, she needed to understand, she wanted to see if that strange, awkward woman on the screen was ever loved or only ever flattered and distracted, if she had always been blind and stumbling and led along, if even now she could see the falsity and malice in Tom's attentiveness, the premeditation in the love and guilt he pressed on that cow eyed woman that ambled along on screen.

_You shouldn't be watching this,_ Red said at last, sounding as though he'd like to forbid it but knowing he didn't have that option.

_What does it matter if I watch?_ she said,_ I lived it, I already know what happened. Anyway if I didn't who would? You? Dembe? Who else would see this if I didn't have the stomach for it?_

_No one. Lizzy, no one would see them, I would destroy them rather than let anyone see… _He put his hand, heavy, on her shoulder, and out of the side of her eye she could see that he was still looking off, away at the far side of the room, not even facing the screen.

On the recording, Tom had left their marriage bed to wash her off him in the shower and the little black and white recorded woman looked listless and confused among the sheets, not happy and luxuriant but sprawled like a dropped doll.

Without completely understanding that she did, Liz began to cry, slow, silent tears. Red's fingers tightened on her shoulder so much it hurt and she leaned her head into his wrist and bit at her cheek against words of shame.

After they had watched and discovered every hiding place Tom kept in their house, Red handed her the stack of disks and she snapped each one. They broke with sharp cracks that stung her hands, but she felt better when she was done.

He sat with her in the back of his sleek black car, afterwards, and told Dembe to drive them to her home, each as far to their own door as they could be and sit upright but when the time came and the car stood ready for her to disembark, she didn't move a muscle and neither did he.

_Liz? _asked Dembe, after a long scrupulous pause, _Would you perhaps like to go somewhere else?_

She couldn't speak, not having words for just how much she could not go into that townhouse with her husband, not that night. She looked to Red, a question plain on her face. He reached for her hand, which she gave, still uncertain with his touch but far from unwilling.

_I think Lizzie is coming home with us tonight, my friend, _said Red and looked to her for her approval.

_Yes, _she said, in a hoarse voice she nearly didn't recognize, _Thank you._

* * *

Only by then they had run out of chaste comfort and when left alone, in dimness and comfort, replete with good things like food and dry, spicy wine, she turned to him - turned on him, nearly - and pitched herself at him like a dare, or a test or another contest to see who would flinch first in holding their hands over the flame. This time she knew it would not be her, she was restless and overwrought, her skin burned for him, she was wound too tight and somehow she'd been rewired, it was only in his direction that she leaned, only under his hands that she could find relief.

It was like the way she used to fly at him in rage, but sweeter, more gone on madness and the squirming longing in her gut. It was a rage of desire and she fell on him with it, gripping and pulling at his arms, his waist his hips, and he moved molasses slow, wariness slow, like a thing confused and waking, responding to her kisses so lightly, so faintly it made her frantic, an anticipation more like panic. And then, with a swift decisiveness her spinning head was slow to recognize, he had her pinned, against the nearest wall, her wrists trapped, pressed full length, his mouth against her cheek and her blood sang with joy, yes, good, soon I will know what he feels like between my legs and maybe I'll stop feeling like a bomb about to go off.

But he turned still and unyielding as stone, his warm breath against her skin taunting her.

_What are you trying to prove here Lizzy?_ he asked,_ Is it really me you're interested in tonight? My mouth, my cock, or would any do? Are you seeking pleasure here? Or are you just trying to hurt me, or hurt your self using me? Because I can help you with the first, oh how I'd love to, even the second, simple pleasure, I wouldn't mind. But the last? I have no stomach for that. I will not hurt you, even if you ask me._

_Oh, Red. I don't know, I don't know, _she whined, small and pained and urgent and reached up to press more hopeful kisses to his mouth, his cheeks, his beautiful chin, I_ just want to do something better, feel something better. Please, you're so good to me. We could do this and it would be real, I know it would._

_Real? Yes, Sweetheart, as real as anything can be, as real as anything you or I have ever managed, _he said and pressed his face alongside hers, released her wrists and gathered her up instead, suddenly tender and gentle and the air turned thick, not with sex but with sadness and her eyes stung with tears.

_Why does it feel like this,_ she asked, _Why does it feel like longing for something we can't ever have? Why does it feel like a clock ticking down._

_Don't think about that now, _he said_, Don't think about what drags at us. I'll be so good to you, my dearest dearest girl. I'll make you feel better._

And he did, oh how he did. He stripped her bare with slow reverence like he was paying homage and leaned her back against the wall and went to his knees before and made her come and come with his able fingers and his skillful mouth. She was so quiet at first, panting, almost startled at how much she could feel and how quickly but soon she was thoughtless with pleasure and making such noises of love and longing. When she was limp and sated and sagging with relief, balanced on her shaking legs and the cool wall and his bracing hands at her hips, he rested his head against stomach as if taking shelter there while she petted the short bristle of his hair and kneaded his still shirt-clad shoulders.

When she began to notice the cold in her nakedness he gathered her up and took her away to his bed and pulled the covers up over her. She was almost asleep by the time he laid her down on the fine linen sheets, her eyes were dropping closed as he kissed her forehead and smoothed her hair, but then he pulled away again, was going to leave her there, wasn't going to let her touch him, not really. Was going to tuck her in and let their little interlude end just like that.

She scrambled to sit up and turn on the bedside lamp, the soft yellow light was flattering to his tired, beloved features, to his lovely tawny skin, his cheeks still flushed, his mouth still swollen, his expression taut and sharp with guilt and wanting.

She wanted to scold him. She wanted to order him to strip down for her. She wanted order him to display some sign of selfishness or pride, some sign she was irresistible to him.

_I don't think I've ever seen you turn down pleasure that was offered you_, she said instead.

_I want you to be able to look at me tomorrow, _he said,_ I want you to be able to talk to me tomorrow and trust me and not feel I've taken something from you when you forgot you shouldn't offer it to me. But most of all I don't want the memory of the first time I'm with you to be forever linked to the memory of that man and those recordings._

_When then, how long is long enough to make you feel that it's— _she shook her head in frustration and felt her hair brushing against her back and shivered, _That man overshadows everything of me, how long will it be until you can touch me and not think of that? I don't want you to see him when you look at me, I want to be clean of him, I want you to make me better._

_I don't — no Lizzie, _he protested with such vehemence, looking overwhelmed, but that didn't ease the sting of his noble denials in the face of her earnest hunger, W_hen I look at you I see only you, when I look at anything, the world, the path ahead and the path behind, I see only you. You take up so much room in my vision and in my heart. But I'm not an antidote for anything, nothing about me is good or clean or healing, I'm just an aberration, just an agent for a kind of agenda or obligation that I hope you never have to understand._

But she was too hurt and too confused and he couldn't explain to her any of the things that might make her understand because back then he thought she might still escape, that she might never need to wake what slumbered in her, that she might still live a whole a simple life in the sun. And she was beautiful and unashamed and naked in the middle of his bed.

He went to her. He held her as they dozed, taking comfort together until comfort stretched needle thin and snapped and they were frantic for each other.

She was all mouth and teeth and tongue, marking his neck, his shoulder, her nimble fingers clutching and hurried. He'd been aching for her so long by then, as he slid into her he worried it might be a dream, but it was real, it was too awkward and urgent and human to be otherwise. His knees were tender from kneeling on the floor for so long, before, and her heels kept slipping against the sheets as she jerked up to meet him and he was sure he hadn't made love to a woman with so little finesse in decades but still she was so slick he could hear the wet sounds they made over her keening, wordless encouragements.

They clutched at each other in stunned, winded silence afterward, shocked despite themselves at how much, how quick, how terribly well they worked together. Shocked at how little effect it had made on how much they wanted, how alone they each still felt, how impossible it still was in the face of who he was and the life she had not yet given up for a lost cause.

Only now, she knew what she must deny herself, and him, and the size of that impossibility felt even larger inside her chest.

In the morning she slipped from his bed, only a few hours later, her thighs still sticky, ignoring the imploring hand he stroked against her back as she slid away and his drowsy, mumbled offer that she stay.

She told him, _This can't happen again. I'm sorry,_ and did't — couldn't — look at him before she went to retrieve her clothes from his living room floor.

* * *

She had no memory of the strange boat ride from the moment he took her hand and helped her sit to when the boat arrived beside a wide stone staircase that seemed to run from beneath the river up and up through a steep and deeply shaded wood where they found themselves. Climbing these stairs took a long time, longer then her sense of space and distance told her it ought to. He held her hand the whole way, his grip firm and dry and warm, he was always so warm, so solid, so strong and human even as he performed the strange and wondrous, even as she knew he was more, was made up of liminal powers and looked into her at times with the ancient waiting watchfulness of the Awoken.

As they climbed it snowed, and the diffuse afternoon dimmed down to an evening of the most vivid white and black and indigo, the pretty woodland, the marble stairs, the great House a silhouette above them on the hill slumbering and bedecked with snow, all of it seemed to her more saturated and resplendent, and simply moreso in an undefinable way, than any other scene she had laid eyes on. She lagged behind him a step or two and he turned to face her, squeezed her hand and raised his eyebrows in question, and oh how golden and beautiful he looked, as if lighted from within but still her own familiar Red with his sweet and wearied face and a dusting of snow gathering on his dark hat and the shoulders of his long dark coat. She was freezing, she realized, and their breath misted in the clear air.

She didn't say anything, there was such a wideness to the silence on that hill over the long and ancient river that she didn't dare break it with anything more than the noise of their footsteps. She hurried up to him instead, smiled into his questioning eyes and kissed his warm cheek.

She wanted to laugh. She should be frightened, she supposed, what he had told her of Elsewhere was not nice, not welcoming, but she knew his secrets now, he'd confessed them in terms she felt nearly sure she's grasped and now he was taking her to his secret home, his Immortal house. Later she would be frightened, later when she understood, but just then she was giddy with love and discovery, the tears she had shed when she turned away from her old life were long dried and forgotten.

The stairway led at last to a great door, the back entrance to his House — later, as he led her around cavernous rooms and long hallways that came to light and warmth as they woke to his presence, he warned her that she must not enter by the front door, _Not ever, do you understand my love?_

_Yes, _she said, _Never._

But she didn't understand yet, not then. She thought herself brought home and bound to him and indoctrinated, that he would not now be slipping away from her, always slipping away from her on his work, because now it was their work, she was to stand at his side. In time she would see that there would always be doors he could walk through that she could not, passageways through which she must never try to follow him, but not then.

* * *

After the first night together, after the first Never Again she went to work and didn't think about Red or Tom and she went home and she put on her edge charade for her husband and didn't think about Red or the limp, discarded version of herself on those damned, thrice damned recordings. Days went by but not many.

The next time Tom reached for her in their marriage bed she flinched and ducked his hands and claimed incipient headache, locked herself in the downstairs bathroom and shook and shook and bit down on the tender side of her own wrist hard enough she left a mark to make sure she didn't break down in hysterics or vomit or call Red and beg him to get her away from there, take her away, take care of Tom and take her away and never look back.

She didn't call him that night. She called him the night after. They met in their war room, their dry, sad little basement, and Dembe hadn't driven him, he'd come by an alternate route he'd said, which was back then just nonsense to her, but it meant they were alone, and could have stayed all night locked away strategizing with no one waiting on them, but they didn't. There was nothing much new to say, nothing new discovered against Berlin to even warrant the meeting — but of course she'd only called him there to see his face and hear his voice and be reassured there was still something of her aside from her masks of Agent Keen and Wifely Liz.

He didn't point out the hollowness of the exercise, only watched her with concern as he recited their few known things. She offered to drive him to his latest lodgings and didn't even pretend she wasn't coming in with him.

That night they didn't talk and he didn't pretend to self-denial and she didn't cry and when they'd recovered from their far too intentional coupling she pretended she didn't still hunger for his simple touch with a fervency she found unsettling and he didn't try to curl all around her the way he had the time before. Somehow she slept deep and still on one side of his palatial bed, he on the other side breathing quietly and maybe sleeping she couldn't tell, didn't yet know that when he truly slept, which wasn't often, he sprawled and twitched and snuffled like a child.

_If you need to tell me this can never happen again, I will understand Elizabeth,_ Red told her as he lay on his side and watched her shuffle into her clothes in the dark, bruised and blustery dawn-light from the window, _I will even believe you._

_Red, oh, I… _she said and stopped buttoning her blouse — she had expected him to rip it from her but he'd undone it so slowly, he'd undressed her so carefully as if memorizing how she moved — and pressed her face into her hands. Still she didn't cry. _I don't know what to do. I don't have enough of me left for this. It can't happen. It can't._

But it did, oh how it did, she didn't even last a week, he was distant with her the whole time, with this look in his eyes like just seeing her was hurting him and it wore down her resolve so quickly she was ashamed. She was ashamed to be so eager to be hungered for, pined for like a courtly knight for his good lady in some old ballad. Only she was no knowing and benevolent Lady, she had grown up with sneakers and ripped jeans and tattered library books and all-american convenience in an anonymous Nebraskan suburb and she'd learned in school that the Old Gods slept beneath the Mountains or behind the mist on the Lost Isle, if that, if it hadn't all just been a joke, a mistranslation, a superstition, a wrong history of the world.

She didn't know that she'd been born of that other history, she didn't know what to do in the face of Red's more than mortal longing, and his more than mortal patience, and they way her own self had seemed to alter in response, as though her breath and bones were being realigned, as though he had somehow struck a tuning fork and set it to her sternum and made her ring and ring.

The third night she spent with him, neither of them slept but lay awake and each confessed things that the other couldn't quite comprehend but absorbed with a kind of bewildered hope. And in the morning she left him with a kiss to his temple and to the knuckles of his hand which had caught hers and she didn't tell him This Can't, she didn't say a word — and that silence, she warned herself, was nearly like a promise.


End file.
